The Changing Realities of Cities

Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Trinity Publications (Newspapers, Yearbooks, The First-Year Papers (2010 - present) Catalogs, etc.) 2018 Postmodernism and the City: The Changing Realities of Cities Nayantara Ghosh Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/fypapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Ghosh, Nayantara, "Postmodernism and the City: The Changing Realities of Cities". The First-Year Papers (2010 - present) (2018). Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford, CT. https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/fypapers/84 Postmodernism and the City: The Changing Realities of Cities Nayantara Ghosh “When you dress up, you really are the best, the king of color. When I wear my bright suits, I look splendid. In my area, people start shouting, ‘The God of Clothes, The God of SAPE!’” – Congo Dandy, “The Congo Dandies: living in poverty and spending a fortune to look like a million dollars” (RT Documentary) There had once been a marvelous kingdom – its people filled with the joy of art, learning, and science; its king so greatly impressed by his territory and people that he would commission a map so wonderful, it would lead all to venture to see its beauty. Working relentlessly, the cartographer would produce a map, as large as the king’s courtroom, its lines depicting the intricacies of rivers and valleys, hills and lakes. Yet, it lacked the complexities of the streets and houses, the characteristics making the kingdom what it was. And so, the cartographer was sent to work again, this time, returning with a far more exquisite iteration, showing the houses, their streets. Yet again, however, it lacked far too many details – where were the delicately sculpted doors, or the leaves adorning the trees, the details of beauty through which the kingdom was to be understood? Again, the cartographer was approached, his work spanning decades, the king nearing the end of his life. Reemerging, there was the map: perfectly in 1:1 scale, with the kingdom as it had been all those years ago, each detailed street and path, each home and each carving. By now, the kingdom had fallen to its vices – disease and marauders, the map now a mere memory of what the kingdom had once been. While this fable is to be attributed to J. L. Borges’ ‘On Exactitude in Science’, it is Baudrillard’s interpretation and re-imagination of the parable-esque story, which holds particular intrigue. It is in his version of this idea, that the map transcends its space of representation, crossing into the realm of reality, as it eventually becomes the reality the citizens of our proverbial kingdom occupy (Baudrillard 166-184). It is, more importantly, this conceptualization of reality within which it is possible to examine post-colonial identity-making within cities by the otherwise subjugated and the globalization which appears at times, to intensify its conspicuousness. Examining specifically societies in Liberia and India as regions of the global south creating for themselves what Baudrillard would have considered simulacrum, as well as African American communities during the period of the Great Migration of 1916 – 1970 (History.com Editors 1), the following essay will seek to expound upon the creation of foreign and at times fictitious realities, as a result of these identity-making processes. Here, while the creation of simulacrum is perhaps endemic to the ascription and transmission of symbols, there is a clear pressure enacted upon subjugated groups seeking to construct identities following periods of subjugation and identity repression (as is often the case within colonialism), that appears to intensify the distribution and extensiveness of simulacrum. At its most basal level, therefore, this paper will attempt to argue that simulacra are hardly specific to societies which have long ago transitioned to modernity. Instead, they may exist within the global south, within regions and peoples restrained in their trajectory towards modernity, and within places themselves on the road towards it. We begin with a broad theoretical understanding of postmodernism, Baudrillard’s framing of the concept, as the distinctive phase of society to be characterized by the replacement of the trade of material goods with the buying and selling of signs and symbols often divorced from material realities. While Baudrillard approaches this with some ambiguity, this is perhaps Postmodernism and the City: The Changing Realities of Cities 1 best understood as the disparity separating essentialist identifications of goods (such as bespoke neon suits, identified substantively through their cloth and tailoring), from their associated images of wealth, prosperity and in the case of the Sapeurs of Congo, membership in the elusive Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, the SAPE (RT Documentary). Here, the images – all-encompassing. The reality – nothing. (Baudrillard 166-184). The Baudrillardian stages of sign development, therefore, follow four primary stages, such that signs – given to be words or images, for example – begin as a ‘reflection of a basic reality’, subsequently becoming distortions of reality, with partial separation from their true origin (the masking and perversion of reality). It is in the third stage of sign development that signs begin to disguise the absence of a basic reality – icons, for example, seeking to disguise Baudrillard’s perceived reality of God’s non-existence. In the final stage of the development of signs, thus far an exercise in segregating stages of detachment from original meaning and basic realities, signs exist in utter severance from what they had originally been signifiers of. It is at this stage, that signs are transfigured into simulacra, bearing “no relation to any reality whatsoever”. They are their “own pure simulacrum”, “copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original” (Baudrillard 166 – 184). Importantly however, it is not solely the detachment of signs from reality that remains the pervasive concept through Baudrillard’s work. It is instead, the reflection and mimicking of that which has never truly existed – in Baudrillard’s terms, hyperreality. To Baudrillard, modern society is distinguished from pre-modern society by this stage of sign development such that society produces and exchanges these untethered signifiers – signifiers once inextricable from the basic realities they had represented. It is, therefore, in the stage following the creation of simulacrum, in its replication and implementation within reality, that hyperreality abounds. In this final self-addition of a stage, we occupy Borge’s map of the kingdom, rather than the now decrepit facsimile of it. It is within this framework that we analyze the simulacra creation of the subjugated – of the Abidjanian youths (Hoffman 41-42) and Congolese dandies for whom monetary surpluses are inevitably tendered towards conspicuous consumption; of the representations of idealism arising from the Indian post-independence crises of identity (Ghosh, speaking at IAD); of the newly diasporic African Americans of 1916 – 1970, for whom stories of migration practices would become shared societal property through the “American Grapevine” (Hunter et al. 27). Postmodernism appears largely similar within the first three aforementioned contexts. In Monrovia, ex-combatants of fallen status construct fictions of wealth, purportedly separate from their realities, à la General ‘Human Garbage’ (Hoffman 33-38). Yet it is not these performances of bravado and wealth which are of particular significance within the context of postmodernism, given Hoffman’s argument that it is the relative lack of possibility for conspicuous consumption which results in the consistent desire for movement and circulation by ex-combatants. In the wake of limited means of demonstrating ostentation, movement by the individual is its panacea. It is rather Hoffman’s contention that “urban practices of invention are often practices of the body”. These are personal externalizations of urban practices present in the Congolese dandies of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, in the Abidjanian bluffeurs for whom reality intertwines effortlessly with the ‘fake’ and imaginary, and in the Ghanian practice of photoshop visualizations transporting them to alternate hyperrealities of a New York skyline, or a painted set mimicking 1950s American living as seen in image 1.1 (Hoffman 41-42). In Congo, it is these men, intending membership in La SAPE (La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes), at the opportunity cost of land, better living conditions, and often, the well-being of more distant 2 Nayantara Ghosh family members (RT Documentary). In the wake of inhibitory paths towards demonstrated social mobility lies traditional Ghanian culture, familial ties, and our once-prosperous kingdom. Simultaneously, the Indian conception of identity and its associated aspirations are also characterized by the complex intertwining of new, outside perceptions of the country and the internal politics of forging self-identity. While in Congo these are images of the dandies, an altered conception of Western formality and fashion, the aspect to be explored within this context is that of film and architecture. Posters of films from the 1970s, mere years following Indian independence perhaps typify this confused duality of the west and the east. Featured in these posters, as seen in images 1.2 and 1.3, are western attired women

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